Collaboration and Professional Service

Five librarians hold secondary faculty appointments within the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) to offer Responsible Conduct of Research training for researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC. Librarians offered sessions on the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy (DMSP); assessing rigor of published research; risk of bias tools; literature searching for animal protocols; and preprint publishing.

To promote research on health disparities, Molecular Biology Information Services initiated bioinformatics workshops, focusing on the analysis of health and genomics data from the All of Us Research Program. This effort was particularly evident in a 7-week session designed for the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP). 

Librarians collaborated with the Office of Science Education Outreach, Health Sciences to prepare the next generation of scientific investigators and clinicians, here in the Pittsburgh community and across the nation. Research and instruction librarians taught classes and working sessions on the basics of scholarly research and finding reliable health information to high school students attending the Health Career Scholars Academy. Additionally, in partnership with the Health Sciences Research Training Program, a high school student received mentoring from HSLS’s bioinformatics specialist.  

Data Services regularly consulted with Health Sciences IT to enhance publication metrics for the rollout of a health sciences departmental dashboard.

Digital Library Services collaborated with anatomy instructors across the health sciences to add Acland’s Video Atlas of Human Anatomy. 

The Institute for Precision Medicine, a collaboration of the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, sponsored and promoted the use of genomics software, as well as offered financial support to aid the ongoing deployment of the CLC Genomics Workbench and other software from QIAGEN. 

Molecular Biology Information Services (MBIS) established a teaching collaboration with faculty in the School of Public Health’s Biostatistics and Human Genetics departments to routinely teach classes on R. HSLS hired a temporary biostatistics intern for additional expertise in programming skills to expand our support for students and researchers interested in analyzing the publicly available genomics data from the All of Us Researcher Workbench. 

Research and instruction librarians taught a class on editing health information in Wikipedia and hosted a #CiteNLM edit-a-thon. During the edit-a-thon, attendees made edits on health-related articles that have since been viewed over 64,000 times. 

HSLS, in partnership with the University Library System, is participating in Ithaka S+R’s project: Building Coordinated Data Support Services. During this two-year initiative, Ithaka will create national benchmarking data on current data support services, build tools to help users navigate existing services, and develop strategies for ensuring the future viability of data support services.